B2B ecommerce has seen immense growth, doubling in almost every sector in the US since 2003, with predictions saying more is coming in 2017 and beyond. Manufacturers and distributors are taking advantage of this trend, recognizing the opportunity to capitalize on the increased traction. Want to take advantage of the growing ecommerce industry, grow your business, and strengthen your customer relationships?

Know Your Customers

For effective inbound marketing, you must center everything around your audience. Think not only about businesses in whatever niche your company serves, but about the employees in your target industry. Influencers and stakeholders in your target audience may involve multiple departments and should be considered in your overall strategy.

To make sure you’re on the right track, create personas and work from there, adjusting based on what data reflects as time goes on. Compare your conversions to your personas and make changes based on the conversions themselves until you have an accurate representation of your market.

Create a Robust Product Catalog

Make research easy. Create a detailed catalog, complete with search, sorting, and filtering options to make it easier for your potential customers to find the products that fit their needs, regardless of complexity. This also empowers your customers to customize orders to their individual needs.

Use Highly Descriptive Product Listings

Since B2B sales often involve multiple people within an organization, it’s important to show value and benefits. One of the easiest ways to do this is to appeal to everyone in the chain of command with your product listing copy. Beyond descriptive language, use high quality images and video to show off your offerings.

Be Mindful of the Longer Sales Cycle

If your products are specific and multiple people play a role in the purchasing process, the sales cycle can last anywhere from a few weeks to more than a year. Marketing through these longer cycles is a definite challenge. Rely on a powerful CRM to help you manage all your contacts, so you can keep track of where your leads are in the buying cycle at all times to improve the customer experience.

Nurture Leads with Content Marketing

Because of that longer sales cycle, nurturing your leads is even more important that it is in the B2C arena, and becomes as essential to lead generation. With content marketing, you can create compelling material to engage potential customers. In addition to informative blog posts, you can create white papers, newsletters, webinars, infographics, and more. When a lead downloads your content, use the contact information to follow up with targeted email marketing to continue nurturing through the decision process.

Use Split-Testing to Optimize Conversion Rate

The specificity of a B2B niche means you’re working with a smaller pool of potential buyers. It’s much easier to sell a laptop to a student than it is to convince businesses in your target market your products will improve their business. High conversion rate matters. To keep things as efficient as possible, your website, ecommerce features included, must be tailored to serve your audience. With split-testing tools and other analytics, you can determine the copy, colors, placements on the screen, and more, with the best impact on conversion rate. Run one split test at a time and continue refining the approach until you’ve found the most effective way to capture and convert your leads. When you find the magic formula, keep using it – but be ready to adjust as the market demands.

Successful B2B ecommerce doesn’t happen overnight, but through dedicated effort and clear strategy, you can draw more customers in, keep those customers happy, and watch profits soar.

When you think about the number of tools you have at your disposal to help you run your business smartly, you might be happy to have so many options. But at the same time, it can be overwhelming to have so many different tools that you have to log into and manage. It’s easy to let things fall between the cracks.

That’s why tools that offer multiple functionality or integrate with other tools are so hot right now. Think about the social media dashboard that lets you manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram rather than you having to log into each separate site. That’s power that saves you major time.

The same goes for customer relationship management software (CRM). CRM that offers multiple functionalities keeps you from having half a dozen tools to get the same effect.

Take project management. It’s something every company needs in order to stay on top of project tasks and deadlines. And yet, if your project is tied directly to a customer, does it really make sense to have a separate project management platform from your CRM?

More and more, we’re seeing CRM platforms with baked-in project management features. The benefit to these platforms is that there’s no gap between the client data and the project management tasks. All the files, assignments, milestones, and due dates are in one place.

1. Projects are Easier to Manage

Let’s say you have a writing project for a client assigned to your best writer. Under this client’s profile, you assign the project to the writer and create a due date. She can sync that task to her Google calendar so she doesn’t even need to log into the CRM to view it.

But if she does log in, she can access your notes from your phone call with the client, view documents of past writing projects to get a sense of writing style, and then upload the documents when she’s completed the work. Everything related to this project and client are in one place. One login. It doesn’t get simpler than that.

2. Teams Have Better Communication

Teams that collaborate can easily see where each team member is on a project, what needs to be done in order to complete it, and any files that relate to the project. You don’t waste time hunting for a document on your computer or Google Drive, only to realize someone else has it or has modified it since you last viewed it.

3. Reports are Easy to Run

If you need to find out the status of a given project, you can easily run project reports from within the CRM that provide data on what’s been completed and what’s still pending so you can address any project bottlenecks that could potentially hold a project up.

4. Nothing Slips Through the Cracks

Not only can you view your assigned tasks on the CRM’s calendar, but you can sync it with your Google or Outlook Calendar so you don’t miss anything. Then, you’ll get email reminders as a backup.

Using CRM with built-in project management capabilities just makes sense. Being able to get a 360 view on both a client and the work you do for him from a single place cuts down drastically on the time you’d otherwise spend on several tools and websites.